By DIYGAMER.com
MMOs seem to be a dime a dozen these days, with the mainstream market getting a new release every other week, be it AAA or Free to Play. But one indie developer has been chipping away at the same game for over seven years now. It’s Zack Johnson, the creator and continual head of Asymetric Publications and the long-standing indie MMO Kingdom of Loathing.
I got a chance to talk to Zack about his game recently, just to see where things are these days and what’s next.
DIYgamer: What’s the general outlook on Kingdom of Loathing these days?
Zack Johnson: We seem to find that any time we try to do any promotion or talk to anyone about it, people say “yeah, I played that five years ago,” and seem to be surprised that it’s still around, that we’re still doing what we’re doing.
Personally, I’ve been playing Kingdom of Loathing for five years. When I first got a desk job out of college, and the hours dragged and my soul shrank, a friend of mine sent me the link over email and suggested I sign up. Shortly thereafter I was born as a stick figure in the Kingdom of Loathing. For anyone new to the title, it’s relatively simple. You’re given a finite amount of turns each day, which can be augmented by eating foods or drinking booze, and once you’re stomach is full, or you drink beyond your alcohol threshold, you’re done for the day; though you can continue chatting it up with other cohorts in the game or gambling. The currency in the game world is literally meat, and a lot of enemies and items in the game are making fun of RPG and MMO tenets that haven’t changed in years. It’s all illustrated in simple sketches and in black and white.
DIYgamer: When did the game launch?
Zack Johnson: You know, I don’t remember. I feel I wasn’t keeping the announcements that early. Late January or early February of 2003. I thought of digging through all my old emails and reconstructing it. I have old backups from March and April of ‘03, but it had been around a little while by then. Quarter one 2003…The fact we’ve been around longer than World of Warcraft surprises people sometimes.
DIY: On the same sort of spectrum of “yes you’re still around,” what would you peg as your biggest breakthroughs across the past seven years that have given some momentum to moving the game forward?
ZJ: It was bringing in just enough money to allow me to safely quit my day job after about eighteen months. One of the first things I did was implement Mr. Store. Because before that you just got the Mr. Accessory and that was it. And implementing Mr. Store spiked the revenue tenfold. That was basically the point that I hired everybody that I hired and it’s kind of remained stable since that point.
For anyone curious what Mr. Store is, it’s the arena where players can get a fancy new item of high value each month. To trade in Mr. Store, players need to acquire a Mr. Accessory. These accessories are gifts given when a player donates $10, but they can also be bought and traded in-game. So to get a new item each month, a player will either need to donate the money and trade in their Mr. Accessory, or be savvy enough with the economy or casino to purchase the item in-game and trade it for the monthly super item.
DIY: Weren’t you one of the first games to implement a kind of micro-transaction market like this?
ZJ: At the time I did it micro-transaction didn’t really mean that. I don’t know if its to our benefit or detriment, but I’ve continued to keep it as donations. The less we claim we’re actually selling someone something, the less legal issues we have to deal with. There’s a lot of weird stuff like that in China where people get a lot crazier about it. As an MMO we’re barely big enough to be on any kind of radar. There’s a secondary currency market, people sell meat for real money. It’s not against the rule, we don’t condone it and we’re not going to do anything if you get ripped off. We’re not going to dedicate a lot of resources to trying to put a stop to it. If we had someone whose full time job it was to stop that, it just wouldn’t be worth it. There are a number of people who gives us money out of the goodness of their hearts and want us to succeed, but I’d say ninety to ninety five percent are the ones who want the stuff in-game. When we’ve gone to any industry stuff, there’s a lot of people talking about doing free-to-play MMOs right now. It’s understood there are these rules you can’t break if you’re doing them. One of them is that you can’t have your micro transaction stuff in the same economy as your in-game stuff. The reason we’ve been successful by doing the opposite of that. It lends us a certain measure of credibility what we try to do with everything is that you can definitely play the game for free, you can see and do everything in the game without giving us money. When we design the donation content we definitely keep that in mind. For a long time we thought would be nice to do a premium content, a bonus for those giving us money, it took us a while to figure out a method of doing that. What you get for the money is the ability to generate a sort of ticket for the additional content which you can then trade with people.
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